Short Story Contest Winner: "The Gerry Program"
It's an odd sensation knowing you're going to die, but it was a feeling Gerry Ferguson had become relatively acquainted with over the past two years. What most perplexed the terminally ill, he observed, was not the concept of death so much as the continuation of all other life.
Gerry's secret project had been in the works for two years now, ever since they found the growth.
Who will mourn me when I'm gone? What trait or idiosyncrasy will people most recall? Will I still be talked of, 100 years from now?
But Gerry didn't worry about these questions. He was comfortable that his legacy would live on, in one form or another. From his cozy flat in the west end of Glasgow, Gerry had managed to put his affairs in order and still find time for small joys.
Feeding the geese in summer at the park just down from his house, reading classics from the teeming bookcase in the living room, talking with his son Michael on Skype. It was Michael who had first suggested reading some of the new works of non-fiction that now littered the large oak desk in Gerry's study.
He was just finishing 'The Master Algorithm' when his shabby grandfather clock chimed six o'clock. Time to call Michael. Crammed into his tiny study, Gerry pulled his computer's webcam close and waved at Michael's smiling face.
"Hi Dad! How're you today?"
"I'm alright, son. How're things in sunny Australia?"
"Hot as always. How's things in Scotland?"
"I'd 'ave more chance gettin' a tan from this computer screen than I do goin' out there."
Michael chuckled. He's got that hearty Ferguson laugh, Gerry thought.
"How's the project coming along?" Michael asked. "Am I going to see it one of these days?"
"Of course," grinned Gerry, "I designed it for you."
Gerry's secret project had been in the works for two years now, ever since they found the growth. He had decided it was better not to tell Michael. He would only worry.
The two men chatted for hours. They discussed Michael's love life (or lack thereof), memories of days walking in the park, and their shared passion, the unending woes of Rangers Football Club. It wasn't until Michael said his goodbyes that Gerry noticed he'd been sitting in the dark for the best part of three hours, his mesh curtains casting a dim orange glow across the room from the street light outside. Time to get back to work.
*
Every night, Gerry sat at his computer, crawling forums, nourishing his project, feeding his knowledge and debating with other programmers. Even at age 82, Gerry knew more than most about algorithms. Never wanting to feel old, and with all the kids so adept at this digital stuff, Gerry figured he should give the Internet a try too. Besides, it kept his brain active and restored some of the sociability he'd lost in the previous decades as old friends passed away and the physical scope of his world contracted.
This night, like every night, Gerry worked away into the wee hours. His back would ache come morning, but this was the only time he truly felt alive these days. From his snug red brick home in Scotland, Gerry could share thoughts and information with strangers from all over the world. It truly was a miracle of modern science!
*
The next day, Gerry woke to the warm amber sun seeping in between a crack in the curtains. Like every morning, his thoughts took a little time to come into focus. Instinctively his hand went to the other side of the bed. Nobody there. Of course; she was gone. Rita, the sweetest woman he'd ever known. Four years this spring, God rest her soul.
Puttering around the cramped kitchen, Gerry heard a knock at the door. Who could that be? He could see two women standing in the hallway, their bodies contorted in the fisheye glass of the peephole. One looked familiar, but Gerry couldn't be sure. He fiddled with the locks and pulled the door open.
"Hi Gerry. How are you today?"
"Fine, thanks," he muttered, still searching his mind for where he'd seen her face before.
Noting the confusion in his eyes, the woman proffered a hand. "Alice, Alice Corgan. I pop round every now and again to check on you."
It clicked. "Ah aye! Come in, come in. Lemme get ya a cuppa." Gerry turned and shuffled into the flat.
As Gerry set about his tiny kitchen, Alice called from the living room, "This is Mandy. She's a care worker too. She's going to pay you occasional visits if that's alright with you."
Gerry poked his head around the doorway. "I'll always welcome a beautiful young lady in ma home. Though, I've tae warn you I'm a married man, so no funny business." He winked and ducked back into the kitchen.
Alice turned to Mandy with a grin. "He's a good man, our Gerry. You'll get along just fine." She lowered her voice. "As I said, with the Alzheimer's, he has to be reminded to take his medication, but he's still mostly self-sufficient. We installed a medi-bot to remind him every day and dispense the pills. If he doesn't respond, we'll get a message to send someone over."
Mandy nodded and scribbled notes in a pad.
"When I'm gone, Michael will have somethin' to remember me by."
"Also, and this is something we've been working on for a few months now, Gerry is convinced he has something…" her voice trailed off. "He thinks he has cancer. Now, while the Alzheimer's may affect his day-to-day life, it's not at a stage where he needs to be taken into care. The last time we went for a checkup, the doctor couldn't find any sign of cancer. I think it stems from--"
Gerry shouted from the other room: "Does the young lady take sugar?"
"No, I'm fine thanks," Mandy called back.
"Of course you don't," smiled Gerry. "Young lady like yersel' is sweet enough."
*
The following week, Mandy arrived early at Gerry's. He looked unsure at first, but he invited her in.
Sitting on the sofa nurturing a cup of tea, Alice tried to keep things light. "So what do you do in your spare time, Gerry?"
"I've got nothing but spare time these days, even if it's running a little low."
"Do you have any hobbies?"
"Yes actually." Gerry smiled. "I'm makin' a computer program."
Alice was taken aback. She knew very little about computers herself. "What's the program for?" she asked.
"Well, despite ma appearance, I'm no spring chicken. I know I don't have much time left. Ma son, he lives down in Australia now, he worked on a computer program that uses AI - that's artificial intelligence - to imitate a person."
Alice still looked confused, so Gerry pressed on.
"Well, I know I've not long left, so I've been usin' this open source code to make ma own for when I'm gone. I've already written all the code. Now I just have to add the things that make it seem like me. I can upload audio, text, even videos of masel'. That way, when I'm gone, Michael will have somethin' to remember me by."
Mandy sat there, stunned. She had no idea anybody could do this, much less an octogenarian from his small, ramshackle flat in Glasgow.
"That's amazing Gerry. I'd love to see the real thing when you're done."
"O' course. I mean, it'll take time. There's so much to add, but I'll be happy to give a demonstration."
Mandy sat there and cradled her mug. Imagine, she thought, being able to preserve yourself, or at least some basic caricature of yourself, forever.
*
As the weeks went on, Gerry slowly added new shades to his coded double. Mandy would leaf through the dusty photo albums on Gerry's bookcase, pointing to photos and asking for the story behind each one. Gerry couldn't always remember but, when he could, the accompanying stories were often hilarious, incredible, and usually a little of both. As he vividly recounted tales of bombing missions over Burma, trips to the beach with a young Michael and, in one particularly interesting story, giving the finger to Margaret Thatcher, Mandy would diligently record them through a Dictaphone to be uploaded to the program.
Gerry loved the company, particularly when he could regale the young woman with tales of his son Michael. One day, as they sat on the sofa flicking through a box of trinkets from his days as a travelling salesman, Mandy asked why he didn't have a smartphone.
He shrugged. "If I'm out 'n about then I want to see the world, not some 2D version of it. Besides, there's nothin' on there for me."
Alice explained that you could get Skype on a smartphone: "You'd be able to talk with Michael and feed the geese at the park at the same time," she offered.
Gerry seemed interested but didn't mention it again.
"Only thing I'm worried about with ma computer," he remarked, "is if there's another power cut and I can't call Michael. There's been a few this year from the snow 'n I hate not bein' able to reach him."
"Well, if you ever want to use the Skype app on my phone to call him you're welcome," said Mandy. "After all, you just need to add him to my contacts."
Gerry was flattered. "That's a relief, knowing I won't miss out on calling Michael if the computer goes bust."
*
Then, in early spring, just as the first green buds burst forth from the bare branches, Gerry asked Mandy to come by. "Bring that Alice girl if ya can - I know she's excited to see this too."
The next day, Mandy and Alice dutifully filed into the cramped study and sat down on rickety wooden chairs brought from the living room for this special occasion.
An image of Gerry, somewhat younger than the man himself, flashed up on the screen.
With a dramatic throat clearing, Gerry opened the program on his computer. An image of Gerry, somewhat younger than the man himself, flashed up on the screen.
The room was silent.
"Hiya Michael!" AI Gerry blurted. The real Gerry looked flustered and clicked around the screen. "I forgot to put the facial recognition on. Michael's just the go-to name when it doesn't recognize a face." His voice lilted with anxious excitement. "This is Alice," Gerry said proudly to the camera, pointing at Alice, "and this is Mandy."
AI Gerry didn't take his eyes from real Gerry, but grinned. "Hello, Alice. Hiya Mandy." The voice was definitely his, even if the flow of speech was slightly disjointed.
"Hi," Alice and Mandy stuttered.
Gerry beamed at both of them. His eyes flitted between the girls and the screen, perhaps nervous that his digital counterpart wasn't as polished as they'd been expecting.
"You can ask him almost anything. He's not as advanced as the ones they're making in the big studios, but I think Michael will like him."
Alice and Mandy gathered closer to the monitor. A mute Gerry grinned back from the screen. Sitting in his wooden chair, the real Gerry turned to his AI twin and began chattering away: "So, what do you think o' the place? Not bad eh?"
"Oh aye, like what you've done wi' it," said AI Gerry.
"Gerry," Alice cut in. "What did you say about Michael there?"
"Ah, I made this for him. After all, it's the kind o' thing his studio was doin'. I had to clear some space to upload it 'n show you guys, so I had to remove Skype for now, but Michael won't mind. Anyway, Mandy's gonna let me Skype him from her phone."
Mandy pulled her phone out and smiled. "Aye, he'll be able to chat with two Gerry's."
Alice grabbed Mandy by the arm: "What did you tell him?" she whispered, her eyes wide.
"I told him he can use my phone if he wants to Skype Michael. Is that okay?"
Alice turned to Gerry, who was chattering away with his computerized clone. "Gerry, we'll just be one second, I need to discuss something with Mandy."
"Righto," he nodded.
Outside the room, Alice paced up and down the narrow hallway.
Mandy could see how flustered she was. "What's wrong? Don't you like the chatbot? I think it's kinda c-"
"Michael's dead," Alice spluttered.
"What do you mean? He talks to him all the time."
Alice sighed. "He doesn't talk to Michael. See, a few years back, Michael found out he had cancer. He worked for this company that did AI chatbot stuff. When he knew he was dying he--" she groped in the air for the words-- "he built this chatbot thing for Gerry, some kind of super-advanced AI. Gerry had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and I guess Michael was worried Gerry would forget him. He designed the chatbot to say he was in Australia to explain why he couldn't visit."
"That's awful," Mandy granted, "but I don't get what the problem is. I mean, surely he can show the AI Michael his own chatbot?"
"No, because you can't get the AI Michael on Skype. Michael just designed the program to look like Skype."
"But then--" Mandy went silent.
"Michael uploaded the entire AI to Gerry's computer before his death. Gerry didn't delete Skype. He deleted the AI Michael."
"So… that's it? He-he's gone?" Mandy's voice cracked. "He can't just be gone, surely he can't?"
The women stood staring at each other. They looked to the door of the study. They could still hear Gerry, gabbing away with his cybercopy.
"I can't go back in there," muttered Mandy. Her voice wavered as she tried to stem the misery rising in her throat.
Alice shook her head and paced the floor. She stopped and stared at Mandy with grim resignation. "We don't have a choice."
When they returned, Gerry was still happily chatting away.
"Hiya girls. Ya wanna ask my handsome twin any other questions? If not, we could get Michael on the phone?"
Neither woman spoke. Gerry clapped his hands and turned gaily to the monitor again: "I cannae wait for ya t'meet him, Gerry. He's gonna be impressed wi' you."
Alice clasped her hands to her mouth. Tears welled in the women's eyes as they watched the old man converse with his digital copy. The heat of the room seemed to swell, becoming insufferable. Mandy couldn't take it anymore. She jumped up, bolted to the door and collapsed against a wall in the hallway. Alice perched on the edge of her seat in a dumb daze, praying for the floor to open and swallow the contents of the room whole.
Oblivious, Gerry and his echo babbled away, the blue glow of the screen illuminating his euphoric face. "Just wait until y'meet him Gerry, just wait."
COVID-19 prompted numerous companies to reconsider their approach to the future of work. Many leaders felt reluctant about maintaining hybrid and remote work options after vaccines became widely available. Yet the emergence of dangerous COVID variants such as Omicron has shown the folly of this mindset.
To mitigate the risks of new variants and other public health threats, as well as to satisfy the desires of a large majority of employees who express a strong desire in multiple surveys for a flexible hybrid or fully remote schedule, leaders are increasingly accepting that hybrid and remote options represent the future of work. No wonder that a February 2022 survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond showed that more and more firms are offering hybrid and fully-remote work options. The firms expect to have more remote workers next year and more geographically-distributed workers.
Although hybrid and remote work mitigates public health risks, it poses another set of health concerns relevant to employee wellbeing, due to the threat of proximity bias. This term refers to the negative impact on work culture from the prospect of inequality among office-centric, hybrid, and fully remote employees.
The difference in time spent in the office leads to concerns ranging from decreased career mobility for those who spend less facetime with their supervisor to resentment building up against the staff who have the most flexibility in where to work. In fact, a January 2022 survey by the company Slack of over 10,000 knowledge workers and their leaders shows that proximity bias is the top concern – expressed by 41% of executives - about hybrid and remote work.
To address this problem requires using best practices based on cognitive science for creating a culture of “Excellence From Anywhere.” This solution is based on guidance that I developed for leaders at 17 pioneering organizations for a company culture fit for the future of work.
Protect from proximity bias via the "Excellence From Anywhere" strategy
So why haven’t firms addressed the obvious problem of proximity bias? Any reasonable external observer could predict the issues arising from differences of time spent in the office.
Unfortunately, leaders often fail to see the clear threat in front of their nose. You might have heard of black swans: low-probability, high-impact threats. Well, the opposite kind of threats are called gray rhinos: obvious dangers that we fail to see because of our mental blindspots. The scientific name for these blindspots is cognitive biases, which cause leaders to resist best practices in transitioning to a hybrid-first model.
The core idea is to get all of your workforce to pull together to achieve business outcomes: the location doesn’t matter.
Leaders can address this by focusing on a shared culture of “Excellence From Anywhere.” This term refers to a flexible organizational culture that takes into account the nature of an employee's work and promotes evaluating employees based on task completion, allowing remote work whenever possible.
Addressing Resentments Due to Proximity Bias
The “Excellence From Anywhere” strategy addresses concerns about treatment of remote workers by focusing on deliverables, regardless of where you work. Doing so also involves adopting best practices for hybrid and remote collaboration and innovation.
By valuing deliverables, collaboration, and innovation through a focus on a shared work culture of “Excellence From Anywhere,” you can instill in your employees a focus on deliverables. The core idea is to get all of your workforce to pull together to achieve business outcomes: the location doesn’t matter.
This work culture addresses concerns about fairness by reframing the conversation to focus on accomplishing shared goals, rather than the method of doing so. After all, no one wants their colleagues to have to commute out of spite.
This technique appeals to the tribal aspect of our brains. We are evolutionarily adapted to living in small tribal groups of 50-150 people. Spending different amounts of time in the office splits apart the work tribe into different tribes. However, cultivating a shared focus on business outcomes helps mitigate such divisions and create a greater sense of unity, alleviating frustrations and resentments. Doing so helps improve employee emotional wellbeing and facilitates good collaboration.
Solving the facetime concerns of proximity bias
But what about facetime with the boss? To address this problem necessitates shifting from the traditional, high-stakes, large-scale quarterly or even annual performance evaluations to much more frequent weekly or biweekly, low-stakes, brief performance evaluation through one-on-one in-person or videoconference check-ins.
Supervisees agree with their supervisor on three to five weekly or biweekly performance goals. Then, 72 hours before their check-in meeting, they send a brief report, under a page, to their boss of how they did on these goals, what challenges they faced and how they overcame them, a quantitative self-evaluation, and proposed goals for next week. Twenty-four hours before the meeting, the supervisor responds in a paragraph-long response with their initial impressions of the report.
It’s hard to tell how much any employee should worry about not being able to chat by the watercooler with their boss: knowing exactly where they stand is the key concern for employees, and they can take proactive action if they see their standing suffer.
At the one-on-one, the supervisor reinforces positive aspects of performance and coaches the supervisee on how to solve challenges better, agrees or revises the goals for next time, and affirms or revises the performance evaluation. That performance evaluation gets fed into a constant performance and promotion review system, which can replace or complement a more thorough annual evaluation.
This type of brief and frequent performance evaluation meeting ensures that the employee’s work is integrated with efforts by the supervisor’s other employees, thereby ensuring more unity in achieving business outcomes. It also mitigates concerns about facetime, since all get at least some personalized attention from their team leader. But more importantly, it addresses the underlying concerns about career mobility by giving all staff a clear indication of where they stand at all times. After all, it’s hard to tell how much any employee should worry about not being able to chat by the watercooler with their boss: knowing exactly where they stand is the key concern for employees, and they can take proactive action if they see their standing suffer.
Such best practices help integrate employees into a work culture fit for the future of work while fostering good relationships with managers. Research shows supervisor-supervisee relationships are the most critical ones for employee wellbeing, engagement, and retention.
Conclusion
You don’t have to be the CEO to implement these techniques. Lower-level leaders of small rank-and-file teams can implement these shifts within their own teams, adapting their culture and performance evaluations. And if you are a staff member rather than a leader, send this article to your supervisor and other employees at your company: start a conversation about the benefits of addressing proximity bias using such research-based best practices.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began invading the world in late 2019, Peter Hotez and Maria Elena Bottazzi set out to create a low-cost vaccine that would help inoculate populations in low- and middle-income countries. The scientists, with their prior experience of developing inexpensive vaccines for the world’s poor, had anticipated that the global rollout of Covid-19 jabs would be marked with several inequities. They wanted to create a patent-free vaccine to bridge this gap, but the U.S. government did not seem impressed, forcing the researchers to turn to private philanthropies for funds.
Hotez and Bottazzi, both scientists at the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine, raised about $9 million in private funds. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s contribution stood at $400,000.
“That was a very tough time early on in the pandemic, you know, trying to do the work and raise the money for it at the same time,” says Hotez, who was nominated in February for a Nobel Peace Prize with Bottazzi for their COVID-19 vaccine. He adds that at the beginning of the pandemic, governments emphasized speed, innovation and rapidly immunizing populations in North America and Europe with little consideration for poorer countries. “We knew this [vaccine] was going to be the answer to global vaccine inequality, but I just wish the policymakers had felt the same,” says Hotez.
Over the past two years, the world has witnessed 488 million COVID-19 infections and over 61 million deaths. Over 11 billion vaccine doses have been administered worldwide; however, the global rollout of COVID-19 vaccines is marked with alarming socio-economic inequities. For instance, 72 percent of the population in high-income countries has received at least one dose of the vaccine, whereas the number stands at 15 percent in low-income countries.
This inequity is worsening vulnerabilities across the world, says Lawrence Young, a virologist and co-lead of the Warwick Health Global Research Priority at the UK-based University of Warwick. “As long as the virus continues to spread and replicate, particularly in populations who are under-vaccinated, it will throw up new variants and these will remain a continual threat even to those countries with high rates of vaccination,” says Young, “Therefore, it is in all our interests to ensure that vaccines are distributed equitably across the world.”
“When your house is on fire, you don't call the patent attorney,” says Hotez. “We wanted to be the fire department.”
The vaccine developed by Hotez and Bottazzi recently received emergency use authorisation in India, which plans to manufacture 100 million doses every month. Dubbed ‘Corbevax’ by its Indian maker, Biological E Limited, the vaccine is now being administered in India to children aged 12-14. The patent-free arrangement means that other low- and middle-income countries could also produce and distribute the vaccine locally.
“When your house is on fire, you don't call the patent attorney, you call the fire department,” says Hotez, commenting on the intellectual property rights waiver. “We wanted to be the fire department.”
The Inequity
Vaccine equity simply means that all people, irrespective of their location, should have equal access to vaccines. However, data suggests that the global COVID-19 vaccine rollout has favoured those in richer countries. For instance, high-income countries like the UAE, Portugal, Chile, Singapore, Australia, Malta, Hong Kong and Canada have partially vaccinated over 85 percent of their populations. This percentage in poorer countries, meanwhile, is abysmally low – 2.1 percent in Yemen, 4.6 in South Sudan, 5 in Cameroon, 9.9 in Burkina Faso, 10 in Nigeria, 12 in Somalia, 12 in Congo, 13 in Afghanistan and 21 in Ethiopia.
In late 2019, scientists Peter Hotez and Maria Elena Bottazzi set out to create a low-cost vaccine that would help inoculate populations in low- and middle-income countries. In February, they were nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Texas Children's Hospital
The COVID-19 vaccination coverage is particularly low in African countries, and according to Shabir Madhi, a vaccinologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and co-director of African Local Initiative for Vaccinology Expertise, vaccine access and inequity remains a challenge in Africa. Madhi adds that a lack of vaccine access has affected the pandemic’s trajectory on the continent, but a majority of its people have now developed immunity through natural infection. “This has come at a high cost of loss of lives,” he says.
COVID-19 vaccines mean a significant financial burden for poorer countries, which spend an average of $41 per capita annually on health, while the average cost of every COVID-19 vaccine dose ranges between $2 and $40 in addition to a distribution cost of $3.70 per person for two doses. In December last year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) set a goal of immunizing 70 percent of the population of all countries by mid-2022. This, however, means that low-income countries would have to increase their health expenditure by an average of 56.6 percent to cover the cost, as opposed to 0.8 per cent in high-income countries.
Reflecting on the factors that have driven global inequity in COVID-19 vaccine distribution, Andrea Taylor, assistant director of programs at the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, says that wealthy nations took the risk of investing heavily in the development and scaling up of COVID-19 vaccines – at a time when there was little evidence to show that vaccines would work. This reserved a place for these nations at the front of the queue when doses started rolling off production lines. Lower-income countries, meanwhile, could not afford such investments.
“Now, however, global supply is not the issue,” says Taylor. “We are making plenty of doses to meet global need. The main problem is infrastructure to get the vaccine where it is most needed in a predictable and timely way and to ensure that countries have all the support they need to store, transport, and use the vaccine once it is received.”
Taufique Joarder, vice-chairperson of Bangladesh's Public Health Foundation, sees the need for more trials and data before Corbevax is made available to the general population.
In addition to global inequities in vaccination coverage, there are inequities within nations. Taufique Joarder, vice-chairperson of Bangladesh’s Public Health Foundation, points to the situation in his country, where vaccination coverage in rural and economically disadvantaged communities has suffered owing to weak vaccine-promotion initiatives and the difficulty many people face in registering online for jabs.
Joarder also cites the example of the COVID-19 immunization drive for children aged 12 years and above. “[Children] are given the Pfizer vaccine, which requires an ultralow temperature for storage. This is almost impossible to administer in many parts of the country, especially the rural areas. So, a large proportion of the children are being left out of vaccination,” says Joarder, adding that Corbevax, which is cheaper and requires regular temperature refrigeration “can be an excellent alternative to Pfizer for vaccinating rural children.”
Corbevax vs. mRNA Vaccines
As opposed to most other COVID-19 vaccines, which use the new Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine technology, Corbevax is an “old school” vaccine, says Hotez. The vaccine is made through microbial fermentation in yeast, similar to the process used to produce the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine, which has been administered to children in several countries for decades. Hence, says Hotez, the technology to produce Corbevax at large scales is already in place in countries like Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, among many others.
“So if you want to rapidly develop and produce and empower low- and middle-income countries, this is the technology to do it,” he says.
“Global access to high-quality vaccines will require serious investment in other types of COVID-19 vaccines," says Andrea Taylor.
The COVID-19 vaccines created by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna marked the first time that mRNA vaccine technology was approved for use. However, scientists like Young feel that there is “a need to be pragmatic and not seduced by new technologies when older, tried and tested approaches can also be effective.” Taylor, meanwhile, says that although mRNA vaccines have dominated the COVID-19 vaccine market in the U.S., “there is no clear grounding for this preference in the data we have so far.” She adds that there is also growing evidence that the immunity from these shots may not hold up as well over time as that of vaccines using different platforms.
“The mRNA vaccines are well suited to wealthy countries with sufficient ultra-cold storage and transportation infrastructure, but these vaccines are divas and do not travel well in the rest of the world,” says Taylor. “Global access to high-quality vaccines will require serious investment in other types of COVID-19 vaccines, such as the protein subunit platform used by Novavax and Corbevax. These require only standard refrigeration, can be manufactured using existing facilities all over the world, and are easy to transport.”
Joarder adds that Corbevax is cheaper due to the developers’ waived intellectual rights. It could also be used as a booster vaccine in Bangladesh, where only five per cent of the population has currently received booster doses. “If this vaccine is proved effective for heterologous boosting, [meaning] it works well and is well tolerated as a booster with other vaccines that are available in Bangladesh, this can be useful,” says Joarder.
According to Hotez, Corbevax can play several important roles - as a standalone adult or paediatric vaccine, and as a booster for other vaccines. Studies are underway to determine Corbevax’s effectiveness in these regards, he says.
Need for More Data
Biological E conducted two clinical trials involving 3000 subjects in India, and found Corbevax to be “safe and immunogenic,” with 90 percent effectiveness in preventing symptomatic infections from the original strain of COVID-19 and over 80 percent effectiveness against the Delta variant. The vaccine is currently in use in India, and according to Hotez, it’s in the pipeline at different stages in Indonesia, Bangladesh and Botswana.
However, Corbevax is yet to receive emergency use approval from the WHO. Experts such as Joarder see the need for more trials and data before it is made available to the general population. He says that while the WHO’s emergency approval is essential for global scale-up of the vaccine, we need data to determine age-stratified efficacy of the vaccine and whether it can be used for heterologous boosting with other vaccines. “According to the most recent data, the 100 percent circulating variant in Bangladesh is Omicron. We need to know how effective is Corbevax against the Omicron variant,” says Joarder.
Shabir Madhi, a vaccinologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and co-director of the African Local Initiative for Vaccinology Expertise, says that a majority of people in Africa have now developed immunity through natural infection. “This has come at a high cost of loss of lives."
Shivan Parusnath
Others, meanwhile, believe that availing vaccines to poorer countries is not enough to resolve the inequity. Young, the Warwick virologist, says that the global vaccination rollout has also suffered from a degree of vaccine hesitancy, echoing similar observations by President Biden and Pfizer’s CEO. The problem can be blamed on poor communication about the benefits of vaccination. “The Corbevax vaccine [helps with the issues of] patent protection, vaccine storage and distribution, but governments need to ensure that their people are clearly informed.” Notably, however, some research has found higher vaccine willingness in lower-income countries than in the U.S.
Young also emphasized the importance of establishing local vaccination stations to improve access. For some countries, meanwhile, it may be too late. Speaking about the African continent, Madhi says that Corbevax has arrived following the peak of the crisis and won’t reverse the suffering and death that has transpired because of vaccine hoarding by high-income countries.
“The same goes for all the sudden donations from countries such as France - pretty much of little to no value when the pandemic is at its tail end,” says Madhi. “This, unfortunately, is a repeat of the swine flu pandemic in 2009, when vaccines only became available to Africa after the pandemic had very much subsided.”